Advancing backcasting for transformative water management

Climate change has become one of the biggest environmental challenges the world is currently facing. Recent IPCC projections indicate that climate change impacts will increase as current incremental-based adaptation management approaches are insufficient to deal with climate-induced systemic shocks and climate uncertainties. Despite the use of advanced climate impact assessment models, some uncertainty about the nature, scale and dynamics of these impacts on water systems remain persistent. Due to this uncertainty and the complexity of these systems, a shift to transformative water management, building on transformative adaptation, is needed to accommodate disruptive futures and transformative change. We cannot rely solely on predictive forward-looking approaches that generate likely futures, which argues in favor of the complementary use of normative approaches. Backcasting is such an approach that produces desirable futures, before looking back from these futures to the present in order to develop adaptation pathways that could lead to such desirable futures. Backcasting can provide directionality to transformative change, which can guide actions and small incremental, gradual steps towards transformative change, enabling to explore a diversity of possible adaptation pathways and pathway switching, but more effort is needed to further advance backcasting for transformative water management. Based on recent insights on both transformative adaptation and the use of backcasting for climate adaptation, this paper proposes nine principles for advancing backcasting for transformative water management.